San Francisco | Thursday
THE motion picture and music industries joined in a lawsuit against websites that are seeking to take the place of Napster in swapping songs and have expanded to allow downloads of Hollywood films.
The suit filed on Tuesday in California seeks to remove copyrighted materials from the sites MusicCity, Grokster and KaZaA, which according to the suit offer unauthorised downloads of music, movies, images and software.
The complaint says the sites are like ”a 21st century piratical bazaar where the unlawful exchange of protected materials takes place across the vast expanses of the Internet,” according to the Recording Industry Association of America in Washington.
The RIAA’s legal action effectively halted the swapping on unauthorised copyrighted songs on Napster, which grew into one of the Internet’s most popular sites before the action.
But Napster’s demise has spawned a number of imitators, and some have expanded the service not only to music but to recent Hollywood movies.
For example, the RIAA said MusicCity offers downloads of recent films such as Legally Blonde, Planet of the Apes and the Princess Diaries in addition to sound recordings by Alicia Keys, Bob Dylan and ‘N Sync.
”We cannot sit idly by while these services continue to operate illegally, especially at a time when new legitimate services are being launched,” said RIAA president Hilary Rosen.
Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti said that ”those named in this suit have sought to profit from works protected by copyright, without obtaining the copyright owner’s permission.”
Named in the suit are MusicCity Networks and its Morpheus service, Grokster LTD, and Dutch-based Fasttrack, which operates the KaZaA network.
The suit said the three services provide user interfaces that differ cosmetically, but access the same network library.
Plaintiffs include a number of major Hollywood studios and recording labels including Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Columbia Pictures, Disney Enterprises, New Line Cinema, Paramount Pictures, Time Warner Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal City Studios, Arista Records, Atlantic Recording and others.
The Internet consulting group Webnoize said recently that FastTrack ”is on the brink of becoming the ‘new Napster’ thanks to its explosive growth in popularity and peer-to-peer technology.”
Napster last month agreed to pay music creators and copyright owners $26-million to settle damages from the past unauthorised use of their songs. The swapping service will also pay a $10-_million advance against future licensing royalties as part of the agreement. Sapa-AFP